Remove Extra Spaces

About the Remove Extra Spaces

This tool removes extra spaces and other whitespace debris from text that has been copied out of a PDF, an email chain or a badly formatted document. Five independent options let you collapse runs of repeated spaces down to one, trim each line, delete blank lines, turn tabs into spaces and pull punctuation back against the word it belongs to. Line breaks are preserved by default so your paragraph structure survives. A before-and-after character count shows exactly how much was stripped, and the whole clean-up runs in your browser with nothing uploaded.

How to use the Remove Extra Spaces

1. 1

   Paste the messy text into the 'Your text' box.

2. 2

   Choose which clean-ups to apply: 'Collapse repeated spaces', 'Trim each line', 'Remove blank lines', 'Convert tabs to spaces' and 'Fix spaces before punctuation'.

3. 3

   Compare the Before, After and Removed character counts in the Cleanup panel.

4. 4

   Copy the cleaned text, or download it as cleaned.txt.

What people use it for

The order the clean-ups run in

The options are applied in a fixed sequence, and knowing it explains results that otherwise look surprising. Tabs are converted to single spaces first, so that a tab sitting next to a space becomes two spaces which the next step can then collapse. Repeated spaces are collapsed second, using a pattern that matches any whitespace except a newline, meaning indentation and mid-sentence gaps shrink to one space while your line structure is untouched. Punctuation spacing is fixed third, removing whitespace that appears immediately before a comma, full stop, semicolon, colon, question mark or exclamation mark. Line trimming runs fourth, stripping leading and trailing whitespace from every individual line. Blank line removal runs last, so lines that only became blank because they contained nothing but spaces are also caught. Finally the whole block is trimmed at both ends. The practical consequence is that turning off 'Trim each line' while leaving 'Collapse repeated spaces' on will reduce a deep indent to a single space rather than removing it, which is often exactly what you want when indentation carries no meaning but a word boundary does.

The whitespace you cannot see

Not every space is the ordinary space at code point 32. Text pasted from web pages and word processors regularly contains a non-breaking space (U+00A0), inserted by HTML entities and by Word's automatic spacing after certain abbreviations. It looks identical, but many programs will not break a line at it and simple search-and-replace routines miss it. The collapse and trim steps here operate on the full Unicode whitespace class, so non-breaking spaces, en spaces, em spaces, thin spaces and the ideographic space used in Japanese and Chinese text are all recognised and handled. Zero-width characters are a different problem: the zero-width space, zero-width joiner and the byte order mark that sometimes leads a file are not whitespace at all in Unicode terms, so they survive the clean-up while remaining invisible. If a line still refuses to match another after cleaning, an invisible zero-width character is the usual culprit, and the character counter will reveal it as an unexpected extra character.